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NEWS
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Program
Descriptions
Classic Program
Senior Focus
Crossing Borders
Volume 6, Number 2 - Spring 2008
Pam
Margraf works in housing services for the state of New Jersey. Susan
Moss is a librarian in the state attorney general’s office. Lois
Gerstein works in that office, too, as an attorney assistant. Joyce Rowe
manages programs for domestic violence shelters. Carol Calix lives in
Trenton. Nour Galil, originally from Sudan, is an artist.
Short stories bring them together.
They gather on folding chairs in the back of Classics Used
and Rare Books in downtown Trenton, where shelf signs list unlikely
juxtapositions: “sports, martial arts, fishing, business, psychology.”
Today the group is led by Patricia Andres, People & Stories executive
director, and John Parkes, coordinator of this Crossing Borders series.
They talk first about last week’s story, Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,”
and another Carver story, “Fat,” which they read several months ago.
“There’s a blue-collar-ish feel about his characters,” says
Calix. “And I like the language.”
“He helps us look at our prejudices and preconceptions of
people: a fat person, a blind person,” adds Moss. She and Rowe mention
people in their own lives—the men who runs the concession stands in
their office buildings, for instance—who are blind, and their own
struggles to connect with people who are different.
“There’s
that center that makes us all human. If you’re with people enough, you
can find it,” Calix says.
Then Andres hands out today’s reading, a poem by Carver’s
widow, Tess Gallagher, called “The Hug.” In it, a man and woman are
approached by a possibly homeless stranger who asks permission to hug
the woman in the couple. Her lover says yes, and in the course of
hugging him, something in the woman’s life is profoundly changed.
The group
talks about the dynamics of generosity and need: If a stranger asks for
money, is that person taking advantage of you? If you give a dollar, are
you making a difference?
“This poem is about another
kind of connection, a human connection,” Calix says. Others talk about
how the hug in the poem violates social boundaries and how it affects
the woman. “It’s opening up a whole new world to her,” says Margraf.
“It’s a short-term symbiotic relationship.”
The hug challenges the exclusivity of the woman’s partnership
with her lover, Moss points out. “It feels like she’s overcome
separation in this embrace,” Andres says. “The poem does seem to end on
a note of longing. What is it we want to go back to?”
And the
group is silent for a moment, thinking.
This will be the last session before Thanksgiving, after six
months of continuous meetings. “It’s so refreshing to have an
intellectual discussion about literature with people. It’s a rare
thing,” says Moss. The mixture of people— suburbanites who work in
Trenton, community members who live there, Galil from Sudan—“has opened
up the world more to me,” says Margraf. Galil calls the group “my
family. It’s changed my life here in Trenton. This is good for me.”
Stories Unite Readers from City and
Suburbs
by Anndee Hochman